Patrick, eighth Lord Oliphant, conformed to the Protestant religion so far as on 12 October 1706 to take the oaths and his seat in the Scots Parliament, in which he acted with the opponents of the Union. He voted at elections of Scottish Representative Peers in 1710 and 1715. He was an officer in the British Army after if not also before his succession to the title; he had Commissions as captain in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Scots 3 November 1708, and in Brigadier Stanwix's regiment on 22 July 1715, which last was disbanded in 1717. One of his extant letters shows him with this regiment in Flanders in January 1712; on the strength of another document he has been described as 'a youth much given to horse racing'. He sold his estate in Banffshire to James Oliphant of Gask, 17 July 1711, and the deed contains a procuratory of resignation of the title (failing heirs-male of his own body) in favor of the disponee. He died in London, 14 January 1720-21, unmarried. He had a natural son, Charles, mentioned in his will.
After his deat his nearest heir being a Jacobite and recusant, the official view was that Francis, son of Captain Francis Oliphant, fourth son of the sixth Lord, became Lord Oliphant, and so the journals of the period state. But by hereditary right, and in the estimation of the family and their friends, the eighth Lord's successor was his uncle, William. |
